Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
THE DAY WILL COME.
THE DAY WILL COME.
A Novel.
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “VIXEN,”
“MOHAWKS,” &c., &c., &c.
Stereotyped Edition.
LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LIMITED,
STATIONERS’ HALL COURT.
1890.
[_All rights reserved_]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
THE DAY WILL COME.
[Illustration: Decoration]
CHAPTER I.
“Farewell, too—now at last—
Farewell, fair lily.”
The joy-bells clashed out upon the clear, bright air, startling the
rooks in the elm-trees that showed their leafy tops above the grey
gables of the old church. The bells broke out with sudden jubilation;
sudden, albeit the village had been on the alert for that very sound
all the summer afternoon, uncertain as to when the signal for that
joy peal might be given.
The signal had come now, given by the telegraph wires to the old
postmistress, and sent on to the expectant ringers in the church
tower. The young couple had arrived at Wareham station, five miles
off; and four horses were bringing them to their honeymoon home
yonder amidst the old woods of Cheriton Chase.
Cheriton village had been on tiptoe with expectancy ever since four
o’clock, although common sense ought to have informed the villagers
that a bride and bridegroom who were to be married at two o’clock
in Westminster Abbey were not very likely to appear at Cheriton
early in the afternoon. But the village having made up its mind to
a half-holiday was glad to begin early. A little knot of gipsies
from the last race-meeting in the neighbourhood had improved the
occasion and set up the friendly and familiar image of Aunt Sally
on the green in front of the Eagle Inn; while a rival establishment
had started a pictorial shooting-gallery, with a rubicund giant’s
face and wide-open mouth, grinning at the populace across a barrel
of Barcelona nuts. There are some people who might think Cheriton
village and Cheriton Chase too remote from the busy world and its
traffic to be subject to strong emotions of any kind. Yet even in
this region of Purbeck, cut off from the rest of England by a winding
river, and ostentatiously calling itself an island, there were eager
interests and warm feelings, and many a link with the great world of
men and women on the other side of the stream.
Cheriton Chase was one of the finest places in the county of Dorset.
It lay south of Wareham, between Corfe Castle and Branksea Island,
and in the midst of scenery which has a peculiar charm of its own, a
curious blending of level pasture and steep hillside, barren heath
and fertile water-meadow; here a Dutch landscape, grazing cattle,
and winding stream; there a suggestion of some lonely Scottish
deer-walk; an endless variety of outline; and yonder on the steep
hilltop the grim stone walls and mouldering bastions of Corfe Castle,
standing dark and stern against the blue fair-weather sky or boldly
confronting the force of the tempest.
Cheriton House was almost as old as Corfe in the estimation of some
of the country people. Its history went back into the night of ages.
But while the Castle had suffered siege and battery by Cromwell’s
ruthless cannon, and had been left to stand as that arch-destroyer
left it, until only the outer walls of the mighty fabric remained,
with a tower or two, and the mullions of one great window standing
up above the rest, the mere skeleton of the gigantic pile, Cheriton
House had been cared for and added to century after century, so that
it presented now a picturesque blending of old and new, in which
almost every corridor and every room was a surprise to the stranger.
Never had Cheriton been better cared for than by its present owner,
nor had Cheriton village owned a more beneficent lord of the manor.
And yet Lord Cheriton was an alien and a stranger to the soil, and
that kind of person whom rustics mostly are inclined to look down
upon—a self-made man.
The present master of Cheriton was a man who owed wealth and
distinction to his own talents. He had been raised to the peerage
about fifteen years before this day of clashing joy-bells and village
rejoicings. He had been owner of the Cheriton estate for more than
twenty years, having bought the property on the death of the last
squire, and at a time of unusual depression. He was popularly
supposed to have got the estate for an old song; but the old song
meant something between seventy and eighty thousand pounds, and
represented the bulk of his wife’s fortune. He had not been afraid so
to swamp his wife’s dowry, for he was at this time one of the most
popular silk gowns at the equity Bar. He was making four or five
thousand a year, and he was strong in the belief in his power to rise
higher.
The purchase, prompted by ambition, and a desire to take his place
among the landed gentry, had turned out a very lucky one from a
financial point of view, for a stone quarry that had been unworked
for more than a century was speedily developed by the new owner of
the soil, and became a source of income which enabled him to improve
mansion-house and farms without embarrassment.
Under Mr. Dalbrook’s improving hand, the Cheriton estate, which had
been gradually sinking to decay in the occupation of an exhausted
race, became as perfect as human ingenuity, combined with judicious
outlay, can make any estate. The falcon eye of the master was on
all things. The famous advocate’s only idea of a holiday was to
work his hardest in the supervision of his Dorsetshire property. He
thought of Cheriton many a time in the law courts, as Fox used to
think of St. Anne’s and his turnips amidst the debauchery of a long
night’s card-playing, or in the whirl of a stormy debate. Purbeck
might have been the motto and password of his life. He was born at
Dorchester, the son of humble shopkeeping parents, and was educated
at the quaint old stone grammar school in that good old town. All
his happiest hours of boyhood had been spent in the Isle of Purbeck.
Those watery meadows and breezy commons and break-neck hills had
been his playground; and when he went back to them as a hard-headed,
overworked man of the world, made arrogant from the magnitude of a
success which had never known check or retrogression, the fountains
of his heart were unlocked by the very atmosphere of that fertile
land where the salt breath of the sea came tempered by the balmy
perfume of the heather, the odour of hedgerow flowers, rosemary, and
thyme.
At Cheriton James Dalbrook unbent, forgot that he was a great man,
and remembered only that his lot was cast in a pleasant place, and
that he had the most lovable of wives and the loveliest of daughters.
His daughter had been born at Cheriton, had known no other country
home, and had never considered the first-floor flat in Victoria
Street where her father and mother spent the London season, and where
her father had his _pied-à-terre_ all the year round, in the light
of a home. His daughter, Juanita, was the eldest of three children
born in the old manor house. The two younger, both sons, died in
infancy; and it seemed to James Dalbrook that there was a blight
upon his offspring, such a blight as that which withered the male
children of Henry of England and Catherine of Arragon. Much had been
given to him. He had been allowed to make name and fortune, he whose
sole heritage was a little crockery shop in a second-rate street of
Dorchester. He had enjoyed the lordship of broad acres, the honours
and position of a rural squire; but he was not to be allowed that
crowning glory for which strong men yearn. He was not to be the first
of a long line of Barons Cheriton of Cheriton.
After the grief and disappointment of those two deaths—first of an
infant of a few weeks old, and afterwards of a lovely child of two
years—James Dalbrook hardened his heart for a little while against
the fair young sister who survived them. She could not perpetuate
that barony which was the crown of his greatness; or if by special
grace her father’s title might be in after-days bestowed upon the
husband of her choice—which in the event of her marrying judiciously
and marrying wealth, might not be impracticable—it would be an alien
to his race who would bear the title which he, James Dalbrook, had
created. He had so longed for a son, and behold two had been given
to him, and upon both the blight had fallen. When people praised
his daughter’s childish loveliness he shook his head despondently,
thinking that she too would be taken, like her brothers, before ever
the bud became a flower.
His heart sickened at thought of this contingency, and of his
heir-at-law in the event of his dying childless, a first cousin,
clerk in an auctioneer’s office at Weymouth, a sandy-haired freckled
youth, without an aspirate, with a fixed idea that he was an
authority upon dress, style, and billiards, an insupportable young
man under any conditions, but hateful to murderousness as one’s next
heir. To think of that freckled snob strutting about the estate in
years to come, blinking with his white eyelashes at those things
which had been so dear to the dead!
His wife, to whom he owed the estate, had no relations nearer or
clearer to her than the freckled auctioneer was to her husband. There
remained for them both to work out their plans for the disposal
of that estate and fortune which was their own to deal with as
they pleased. Already James Dalbrook had dim notions of a Dalbrook
Scholarship Fund, in which future barristers should have their long
years of waiting upon fortune made easier to them, and for which they
should bless the memory of the famous advocate.
Happily those brooding fears were not realized; this time the bud
was not blighted, the flower carried no canker in its heart, but
opened its petals to the morning of life, a strong bright blossom,
revelling in sun and shower, wind and spray. Juanita grew from
babyhood to girlhood with hardly an illness, save the regulation
childish complaints, which touched her as lightly as a butterfly’s
wing touches the flowers.
Her mother was of Spanish extraction, the granddaughter of a Cadiz
merchant, who had failed in the wine trade and had left his sons and
daughters to carve their own way to fortune. Her father had gone
to San Francisco at the beginning of the gold fever, had been one
of the first to understand the safest way to take advantage of the
situation, and had started a wine-shop and hotel, out of which he
made a splendid fortune within fifteen years. He acquired wealth in
good time to send his two daughters to Paris for their education,
and by the time they were grown up he was rich enough to retire from
business, and was able to dispose of his hotel and wine-store for a
sum which made a considerable addition to his capital. He established
himself in a brand-new first-floor in one of the avenues of the Bois
de Boulogne, a rich widower, more of an American than a Spaniard
after his long exile, and he launched his two handsome daughters in
Franco-American society. From Paris they went to London, and were
well received in that upper middle-class circle in which wealth
can generally command a welcome, and in which a famous barrister,
like Mr. Dalbrook, ranks as a star of the first magnitude. James
Dalbrook was then at the apogee of his success, a large handsome
man on the right side of his fortieth birthday. He was not by any
means the kind of man who would seem a likely suitor for a beautiful
girl of three and twenty; but it happened that his heavily handsome
face and commanding manner, his deep, strong voice and brilliant
conversation possessed just the charm that could subjugate Maria
Morales’ fancy. His conquest came upon him as a bewildering surprise,
and nothing could be further from his thoughts than a marriage
with the Spaniard’s daughter; and yet within six weeks of their
first meeting at a Royal Academy soirée in the shabby old rooms in
Trafalgar Square, Mr. Dalbrook and Miss Morales were engaged, with
the full consent of her father, who declared himself willing to give
his daughter forty thousand pounds, strictly settled upon herself,
for her dowry, but who readily doubled that sum when his future
son-in-law revealed his desire to become owner of Cheriton, and to
found a family. For such a laudable purpose Mr. Morales was willing
to make sacrifices; more especially as Maria’s elder sister had
offended him by marrying without his consent, an offence which was
only cancelled by her untimely death soon after her marriage.
Juanita was only three years old when her father was raised to the
bench, and she was not more than six when he was offered a peerage,
which he accepted promptly, very glad to exchange the name of
Dalbrook—still extant over the old shop-window in Dorchester, though
the old shopkeepers were at rest in the cemetery outside the town—for
the title of Baron Cheriton.
As Lord Cheriton James Dalbrook linked himself indissolubly with
the lands which his wife’s money had bought—money made in a ’Frisco
wine-shop for the most part. Happily, however, few of Lord Cheriton’s
friends were aware of that fact. Morales had traded under an assumed
name in the miners’ city, and had only resumed his patronymic on
retiring from the bar and the wine-vaults.
It will be seen, therefore, that Juanita could not boast of
aristocratic lineage upon either side. Her beauty and grace, her
lofty carriage and high-bred air, were spontaneous as the beauty of
a wild flower upon one of those furzy knolls over which her young
feet had bounded in many a girlish race with her dogs or her chosen
companion of the hour. She looked like the daughter of a duke,
although one of her grandfathers had sold pots and pans, and the
other had kept order, with a bowie-knife and a revolver in his belt,
over the humours of a ’Frisco tavern, in the days when the city was
still in its rough and tumble infancy, fierce as a bull-pup. Her
father, who, as the years went on, worshipped this only child of
his, never forgot that she lacked that one sovereign advantage of
good birth and highly placed kindred; and thus it was that from her
childhood he had been on the watch for some alliance which should
give her these advantages.
The opportunity had soon offered itself. Among his Dorsetshire
neighbours one of the most distinguished was Sir Godfrey Carmichael,
a man of old family and good estate, highly connected on the maternal
side, and well connected all round, and married to the daughter of
an Irish peer. Sir Godfrey showed himself friendly from the hour
of Mr. Dalbrook’s advent in the neighbourhood. He declared himself
delighted to welcome new blood when it came in the person of a man
of talent and power. Lady Jane Carmichael was equally pleased with
James Dalbrook’s gentle wife. The friendship thus begun never knew
any interruption till it ended suddenly in a ploughed field between
Wareham and Wimbourne, where Sir Godfrey’s horse blundered at a
fence, fell, and rolled over his rider, ten years after Juanita’s
birth.
There were two daughters and a son, considerably their junior,
who succeeded his father at the age of fifteen, and who had been
Juanita’s playfellow ever since she could run alone.
The two fathers had talked together of the possibilities of the
future while their children were playing tennis on the lawn at
Cheriton, or gathering blackberries on the common. Sir Godfrey
was enough a man of the world to rejoice in the idea of his son’s
marriage with the heiress of Cheriton, albeit he knew that the little
dark-eyed girl, with the tall slim figure and graceful movements, had
no place among the salt of the earth. His own estate was a poor thing
compared with Cheriton and the Cheriton stone-quarries; and he knew
that Dalbrook’s professional earnings had accumulated into a very
respectable fortune invested in stocks and shares of the soundest
quality. Altogether his son could hardly do better than continue to
attach himself to that dark-eyed child as he was attaching himself
now in his first year at Eton, riding his pony over to Cheriton every
non-hunting day, and ministering to her childish caprices in all
things.
The two mothers had talked of the future with more detail and more
assurance than the fathers, as men of the world, had ventured upon.
Lady Cheriton was in love with her little girl’s boyish admirer.
His frank, handsome face, open-hearted manner, and undeniable pluck
realized her ideal of high-bred youth. His mother was the daughter
of an earl, his grandmother was the niece of a duke. He had the
right to call an existing duke his cousin. These things counted for
much in the mind of the storekeeper’s daughter. Her experience at
a fashionable Parisian convent had taught her to worship rank; her
experience of English middle-class society had not eradicated that
weakness. And then she saw that this fine, frank lad was devoted to
her daughter with all a boy’s ardent feeling for his first sweetheart.
The years went on, and young Godfrey Carmichael and Juanita Dalbrook
were sweethearts still—sweethearts always—sweethearts when he was
at Eton, sweethearts when he was at Oxford, sweethearts in union,
and sweethearts in absence, neither of them ever imagining any other
love; and now, in the westering sunlight of this July evening, the
bells of Cheriton Church were ringing a joy-peal to celebrate their
wedded loves, and the little street was gay with floral archways and
bright-coloured bunting, and mottoes of welcome and greeting, and
Lady Cheriton’s barouche was bringing the bride and bridegroom to
their first honeymoon dinner, as fast as four horses could trot along
the level road from quiet little Wareham.
By a curious fancy Juanita had elected to spend her honeymoon in
that one house of which she ought to have been most weary, the good
old house in which she had been born, and where all her days of
courtship, a ten years’ courtship, had been spent. In vain had the
fairest scenes of Europe been suggested to her. She had travelled
enough to be indifferent to mountains and lakes, glaciers and fjords.
“I have seen just enough to know that there is no place like home,”
she said, with her pretty air of authority. “I won’t have a honeymoon
at all if I can’t have it at Cheriton. I want to feel what it is like
to have you all to myself in my own place, Godfrey, among all the
things I love. I shall feel like a queen with a slave; I shall feel
like Delilah with Samson. When you are quite tired of Cheriton—and
subjection, you shall take me to the Priory; and once there you shall
be master and I will be slave.”
“Sweet mastership, tyrannous slavery,” he answered, laughing. “My
darling, Cheriton will suit me better than any other place in the
world for my honeymoon, for I shall be near my future electors, and
shall be able to study the political situation in all its bearings
upon—the Isle of Purbeck.”
Sir Godfrey was to stand for his division of the county in the
election that was looming in the distance of the late autumn. He
was very confident of success, as a young man might be who came of
a time-honoured race, and knew himself popular in the district,
armed with all the newest ideas, too, full to the brim of the most
modern intelligence, a brilliant debater at Oxford, a favourite
everywhere. His marriage would increase his popularity and strengthen
his position, with the latent power of that larger wealth which must
needs be his in the future.
The sun was shining in golden glory upon grey stone roofs and grey
stone walls, clothed with rose and honeysuckle, clematis and trumpet
ash,—upon the village forge, where there had been no work done since
the morning, where the fire was out, and the men were lounging at
door and window in their Sunday clothes,—upon the three or four
village shops, and the two village inns, the humble little house of
call opposite the forge, with its queer old sign, “Live and Let
Live,” and the good old “George Hotel,” with sprawling, dilapidated
stables and spacious yard, where the mail-coach used to stop in the
days that were gone.
There was a floral arch between the little tavern and the forge—a
floral display along the low rustic front of the butcher’s shop—and
the cottage post-office was converted into a bower. There were
calico mottoes flapping across the road—“Welcome to the Bride and
Bridegroom,” “God Bless Them Both,” “Long Life and Happiness,” and
other fond and hearty phrases of time-honoured familiarity. But those
clashing bells, with their sound of tumultuous gladness, a joy that
clamoured to the blue skies above and the woods below, and out to the
very sea yonder, in its loud exuberance, those and the smiling faces
of the villagers were the best of all welcomes.
There were gentlefolks among the crowd—a string of pony carts and
carriages drawn up on the long slip of waste grass beyond the forge,
just where the road turned off to Cheriton Chase; and there were two
or three horsemen, one a young man upon a fine bay cob, who had been
walking his horse about restlessly for the last hour or so, sometimes
riding half a mile towards the station in his impatience.
The carriage came towards the turning-point, the bride bowing and
smiling as she returned the greetings of gentle and simple. Emotion
had paled the delicate olive of her complexion, but her large dark
eyes were bright with gladness. Her straw-coloured tussore gown and
leghorn hat were the perfection of simplicity, and seemed to surround
her with an atmosphere of coolness amidst the dust and glare of the
road.
At sight of the young man on the bay cob, she put her hand on Sir
Godfrey’s arm and said something to him, on which he told the
coachman to stop. They had driven slowly through the village, and the
horses pulled up readily at the turn of the road.
“Only to think of your coming so far to greet us, Theodore!” said
Juanita, leaning out of the carriage to shake hands with the owner of
the cob.
“I wanted to be among the first to welcome you, that was all,” he
answered quietly. “I had half a mind to ride to the station and be
ready to hand you into your carriage, but I thought Sir Godfrey might
think me a nuisance.”
“No fear of that, my dear Dalbrook,” said the bridegroom. “I should
have been very glad to see you. Did you ride all the way from
Dorchester?”
“Yes; I came over early in the morning, breakfasted with a friend,
rested the cob all day, and now he is ready to carry me home again.”
“What devotion!” said Juanita, laughingly, yet with a shade of
embarrassment.
“What good exercise for Peter, you mean. Keeps him in condition
against the cubbing begins. God bless you, Juanita. I can’t do
better than echo the invocation above our heads, ‘God bless the bride
and bridegroom.’”
He shook hands with them both for the second time. A faint glow of
crimson swept over his frank fair face as he clasped those hands.
His honest grey eyes looked at his cousin for a moment with grave
tenderness, in which there was the shadow of a life-long regret. He
had loved and wooed her, and resigned her to her more favoured lover,
and he was honest in his desire for her happiness. His own gladness,
his own life, seemed to him of small account when weighed against her
well-being.
“You must come and dine with us before we leave Cheriton, Dalbrook,”
said Sir Godfrey.
“You are very good. I am off to Heidelberg for a holiday as soon as I
can wind up my office work. I will offer myself to you later on, if I
may, when you are settled at the Priory.”
“Come when you like. Good-bye.”
The carriage turned the corner. The crowd burst into a cheer: one,
two, three, and then another one: and then three more cheers louder
than the first three, and the horses were on the verge of bolting for
the rest of the way to Cheriton.
Theodore Dalbrook rode slowly away from the village festivities, rode
away from the clang of the joy-bells, and the sound of rustic triple
bob majors. It would be night before he reached Dorchester; but there
was a moon, and he knew every yard of high road, every grassy ride
across the wide barren heath between Cheriton and the old Roman city.
He knew the road and he knew his horse, which was as good of its
kind as there was to be found in the county of Dorset. He was not a
rich man, and he had to work hard for his living, but he was the son
of a well-to-do father, and he never stinted the price of the horse
that carried him, and which was something more to Theodore Dalbrook
than most men’s horses are to them. It was his own familiar friend,
companion, and solace. A man might have understood as much only to
see him lean over the cob’s neck, and pat him, as he did to-night,
riding slowly up the hill that leads from Cheriton to the wild ridge
of heath above Branksea Island.
Theodore Dalbrook, junior partner in the firm of Dalbrook & Son,
Cornhill, Dorchester, was a more distant relative of Juanita’s than
the sandy first-cousin in the auctioneer’s office whom Lord Cheriton
had once hated as the only alternative to a charitable endowment.
The sandy youth was the only son of Lord Cheriton’s elder brother,
long since dead. Theodore was the grandson of a certain Matthew
Dalbrook, a second cousin of Lord Cheriton’s, and once upon a time
the wealthiest and most important member of the Dalbrook family. The
humble-minded couple in the crockery shop had looked up to Matthew
Dalbrook, solicitor, with a handsome old house in Cornhill, a smart
gig, a stud of three fine horses, and half the county people for
his clients. To the plain folks behind the counter, who dined at
one and supped on cold meat and pickles and Dutch cheese at nine
of the clock, Mr. Dalbrook, the lawyer, was a great man. They were
moved by his condescension when he dropped in to the five-o’clock
tea, and talked over old family reminiscences, the farmhouse on the
Weymouth Road, which was the cradle of their race, and where they had
all known good days while the old people were alive, and while the
homestead was a family rendezvous. That he should deign to take tea
and water-cresses in the little parlour behind the shop, he who had
a drawing-room almost as big as a church, and a man-servant in plain
clothes to wait upon him at his six-o’clock dinner, was a touching
act of humility in their eyes. When their younger boy brought home
prizes and certificates of all kinds from the grammar school, it was
from Matthew they sought advice, modestly, and with the apprehension
of being deemed over-ambitious.
“I’m afraid he’s too much of a scholar for the business,” said the
mother, shyly, looking fondly at her tall, overgrown son, pallid with
rapid growth and overmuch Greek and Latin.
“Of course he is; that boy is too good to sell pots and pans. You
must send him to the University, Jim.”
Jim, the father, looked despondently at James, the son. The
University meant something awful in the crockery merchant’s mind: a
vast expenditure of money; dreadful hazards to religion and morals;
friendships with dukes and marquises, whose influence would alienate
the boy from his parents, and render him scornful of the snug
back-parlour, with his grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece,
painted in oils by a gifted townsman, who had once had a picture very
nearly hung in the Royal Academy.
“I couldn’t afford to send him to college,” he said.
“Oh, but you must afford it. I must help you, if you and Sarah
haven’t got enough in an old stocking anywhere—as I dare say you
have. My boys are at the University, and they didn’t do half as well
at the grammar school as your boy has done. He must go to Cambridge,
he must be entered at Trinity Hall, and if he works hard and keeps
steady he needn’t cost you a fortune. You would work, eh, James?”
“Wouldn’t I just, that’s all,” James replied with emphasis.
His heart had sickened at the prospect of the crockery business:
the consignments of pots and pans; the returned empties, invoices,
quarterly accounts, matchings, rivetings, dust, straw, dirt, and
degradation. He could not see the nobility of labour in that dusty
shop, below the level of the pavement, amid ewers and basins, teacups
and beer jugs, sherries and ports. But to work in the University—hard
by that great college where Bacon had worked, and Newton, and a host
of the mighty dead, and where Whewell, a self-made man, was still
head—to work among the sons of gentlemen, and with a view to the
profession of a gentleman,—_that_ would be labour for which to live;
for which to die, if need be.
“If—if mother and me were to strain a p’int,” mused the crockery man,
who was better able to afford the University for his son than many a
gentleman of Dorset whose boys had to be sent there, willy nilly, “if
mother and me that have worked so hard for our money was willing to
spend a goodish bit of it upon sending him to college, what are we to
do with him after we’ve made a fine gentleman of him? _That’s_ where
it is, you see, Mat.”
“You are not going to make a fine gentleman of him. God forbid. If he
does well at Cambridge, you can make a lawyer of him. Trinity Hall is
the nursery of lawyers. You can article him to me; and look you here,
Jim, if I don’t have to help you pay for his education, I’ll give him
his articles. There, now, what do you say to that?”
The offer was pronounced a generous one, and worthy of a blood
relation; but James Dalbrook never took advantage of his kinsman’s
kindness. His University career was as successful as his progress
at the quaint stone grammar school, and his college friends, who
were neither dukes nor marquises, but fairly sensible young men, all
advised him to apply himself to the higher branch of the law. So
James Dalbrook, of Trinity Hall, ate his dinners at the Temple during
his last year of undergraduate life, came out seventh wrangler,
was called to the Bar, and in due course wore crimson, velvet, and
ermine, and became Lord Cheriton, a man whose greatness in somewise
overshadowed the small provincial dignity of the house of Matthew
Dalbrook, erstwhile head of the family.
The Dalbrooks, of Dorchester, had gone upon their way quietly,
thriving, respected, but in no wise distinguished. Matthew, junior,
had succeeded his father, Matthew, senior, and the firm in Cornhill
had been Dalbrook & Son for more than thirty years; and now Theodore,
the eldest of a family of five, was Son, and his grandfather, the
founder of the firm, was sleeping the sleep of the just in the
cemetery outside Dorchester.
Lord Cheriton was too wise a man to forget old obligations or
to avoid his kindred. There was nothing to be ashamed of in his
connection with a thoroughly reputable firm like Dalbrook & Son.
They might be provincial, but their name was a synonym for honour
and honesty. They had taken as firm root in the land as the county
families whose title-deeds and leases, wills and codicils they kept.
They were well-bred, well-educated, God-fearing people, with no
struggling ambitions, no morbid craving to get upon a higher social
level than the status to which their professional position and their
means entitled them. They rode and drove good horses, kept good
servants, lived in a good house, visited among the county people
with moderation, but they made no pretensions to being “smart.”
They offered no sacrifices of fortune or self-respect to the modern
Moloch—Fashion.
There was a younger son called Harrington, destined for the Church,
and with advanced views upon church architecture and music; and there
were two unmarried daughters, Janet and Sophia, also with advanced
views upon the woman’s rights question, and with a sovereign contempt
for the standard young lady.
Theodore’s lines were marked out for him with inevitable precision.
He had been taken into partnership the day he was out of his
articles, and at seven-and-twenty he was his father’s right hand,
and represented all that was modern and popular in the firm. He
was steady as a rock, had an intellect of singular acuteness, a
ready wit, and very pleasing manners. He had, above all things,
the inestimable gift of an equable and happy temper. He had been
everybody’s favourite from the nursery upwards, popular at school,
popular at the University, popular in the local club, popular in the
hunting field; and it was the prevailing opinion of Dorchester that
he ought to marry an heiress and make a great position for the house
of Dalbrook. Some people had gone so far as to say that he ought to
marry Lord Cheriton’s daughter.
He had been made free of the great house at Cheriton from the time
he was old enough to visit anywhere. His family had been bidden to
all notable festivities; had been duly called upon, at not too long
intervals, by Lady Cheriton. He had ridden by Juanita’s side in many
a run with the South Dorset foxhounds, and had waited about with
her outside many a covert. They had pic-nicked and made gipsy tea
at Corfe Castle; they had rambled in the woods near Studland; they
had sailed to Branksea, and, further away, to Lulworth Cove, and the
romantic caves of Stare: but this had been all in frank cousinly
friendship. Theodore had seen only too soon that there was no room
for him in his kinswoman’s heart. He began by admiring her as the
loveliest girl he had ever seen; he had ended by adoring her, and he
adored her still—but with a loyal regard which accepted her position
as another man’s wife; and he would have died sooner than dishonour
her by one unholy thought.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he rode slowly along the avenue that
led into Dorchester. The moon was shining between the overarching
boughs of the sycamores. The road with that high overarching roof
had a solemn look in the moonlit stillness. The Roman amphitheatre
yonder, with its grassy banks rising tier above tier, shone white
in the moonbeams; the old town seemed half asleep. The house in
Cornhill had a very Philistine look as compared with that fine old
mansion of Cheriton which was present in his mind in very vivid
colours to-night, those two wandering about the old Italian garden,
hand-in-hand, wedded lovers, with the lamp-lit rooms open to the
soft summer night, and the long terrace and stone balustrade and
moss-grown statues of nymph and goddess silvered by the moonbeams.
The Cornhill house was a good old house notwithstanding, a panelled
house of the Georgian era, with a wide entrance-hall, and a
well-staircase with carved oak balusters and a baluster rail a foot
broad. The furniture had been very little changed since the days
of Theodore’s great-grandfather, for the late Mrs. Dalbrook had
cherished no yearnings for modern art in the furniture line. Her
gentle spirit had looked up to her husband as a leader of men, and
had reverenced chairs and tables, bureaus and wardrobes that had
belonged to his grandfather, as if they were made sacred by that
association. And thus the good old house in the good old town had a
savour of bygone generations, an old family air which the parvenu
would buy for much gold if he could. True that the dining-room chairs
were over-ponderous, and the dining-room pictures belonged to the
obscure school of religious art in which you can only catch your
saint or your martyr at one particular angle; yet the chairs were of
a fine antique form, and bore the crest of the Dalbrooks on their
shabby leather backs, and the pictures had a respectable brownness
which might mean Holbein or Rembrandt.
The drawing-room was large and bright, with four narrow, deeply
recessed windows commanding the broad street and the Antelope Hotel
over the way, and deep window seats crammed with flowers. Here the
oak panelling had been painted pale pink, and the mouldings picked
out in a deeper tint by successive generations of Vandals, but the
effect was cheerful, and the pink walls made a good background for
the Chippendale secretaires and cabinets filled with willow-pattern
Worcester or Crown Derby. The window-curtains were dark brown cloth,
with a border of Berlin wool lilies and roses, a border which would
have set the teeth of an æsthete on edge, but which blended with
the general brightness of the room. Old Mrs. Matthew Dalbrook, the
grandmother, and her three spinster daughters had toiled over these
cross-stitch borders, and Theodore’s mother would have deemed it
sacrilege to have put aside this labour of a vanished life.
Harrington Dalbrook and his two sisters were in the drawing-room,
each apparently absorbed in an instructive book, and yet all three
had been talking for the greater part of the evening. It was a
characteristic of their highly intellectual lives to nurse a volume
of Herbert Spencer or a treatise upon the deeper mysteries of Buddha,
while they discussed the conduct or morals of their neighbours—or
their gowns and bonnets.
“I thought you were never coming home, Theo,” said Janet. “You don’t
mean to say you waited to see the bride and bridegroom?”
“That is exactly what I do mean to say. I had to get old Sandown’s
lease executed, and when I had finished my business I waited about to
see them arrive. Do you think you could get me anything in the way of
supper, Janie?”
“Father went to bed ever so long ago,” replied Janet; “it’s
dreadfully late.”
“But I don’t suppose the cook has gone to bed, and perhaps she would
condescend to cut me a sandwich or two,” answered Theodore, ringing
the bell.
His sisters were orderly young women, who objected to eating and
drinking out of regulation hours. Janet looked round the room
discontentedly, thinking that her brother would make crumbs. Young
men, she had observed, are almost miracle workers in the way of
crumbs. They can get more superfluous crumbs out of any given piece
of bread than the entire piece would appear to contain, looked at by
the casual eye.
“I have found a passage in Spencer which most fully bears out _my_
view, Theodore,” said Sophia, severely, referring to an argument she
had had with her brother the day before yesterday.
“How did she look?” asked Janet, openly frivolous for the nonce.
“Lovelier than I ever saw her look in her life,” answered Theodore.
“At least I thought so.”
He wondered, as he said those words, whether it had been his own
despair at the thought of having irrevocably lost her which invested
her familiar beauty with a new and mystic power. “Yes, she looked
exquisitely lovely, and completely happy—an ideal bride.”
“If her nose were a thought longer her face would be almost perfect,”
said Janet. “How was she dressed?”
“I can no more tell you than I could say how many petals there are
in that Dijon rose yonder. She gave me an impression of cool soft
colour. I think there was yellow in her hat—pale yellow, like a
primrose.”
“Men are such dolts about women’s dress,” retorted Janet,
impatiently; “and yet they pretend to have taste and judgment, and to
criticize everything we wear.”
“I think you may rely upon us for knowing what we _don’t_ like,” said
Theodore.
He seated himself in his father’s easy-chair, a roomy old chair
with projecting sides, that almost hid him from the other occupants
of the room. He was weary and sad, and their chatter irritated his
overstrung nerves. He would have gone straight to his own room on
arriving, but that would have set them wondering, and he did not want
to be wondered about. He wanted to keep his secret, or as much of it
as he could. No doubt those three knew that he had been fond of her,
very fond; that he would have sacrificed half his lifetime to win her
for the other half; but they did not know how fond. They did not know
that he would fain have melted down all the sands of time into one
grain of gold—one golden day in which to hold her to his heart and
know she loved him.